Autonomous faculties of the police in the criminal procedural system of Chile

Abstract

Successive amendments to the Cri-minal Procedure Code have increased the scope of application of the faculties of autonomous action of the police, for which it does not need prior order of the prosecutor or the judge. In this paper, in order to demonstrate and evaluate this increase, a systematic analysis of the current configuration of such functions is carried out, trying to distinguish bet-ween those whose expansion has meant a correlative increase in the risk of affecting fundamental rights and those whose widening has not produced that effect